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Song of Cecilia: assorted additions to the real-time novel

REAL NEWS ABOUT BODY SURFING AND RIDING WAVES

Taurus "Free Will Astrology" forecast for the week of July 21
If there were such a thing as the Queen of Heaven -- a living Goddess whose presence both calmed and excited you, a
numinous female magician who lit up your longing to see life as it really is -- and if this Queen of Heaven came to be
with you right now, what would you say? Would you ask her to help you, and if so, how? Would you seek an answer to
the most important question in your life? Would you spill every secret and tell every story you've ever wanted to share,
and trust that she'd be able to see the totality of who you really are? I advise you to do this imaginative exercise
sometime soon. The time has come for you to receive a blessing from the highest expression of feminine power.

-- Rob Brezsny

  Dear Cecilia,

  Sometimes when karma returns like wild lupines in the summer sun, like salmon to spawn, it seems to wash over me in
waves, one after the other until the seventh wave simply lifts me out of the water and lands me on the beach where I
belong all along.
  That’s what my job search of the past year has done, and now I have returned to the beach of my dreams with a
position in REAL news once again – writing like I was born to do, running like I have been all my life, living exactly in
rhythm and harmony with all my natural surroundings.
  On a crystal-blue-persuasion day, I am officially a reporter again for The Daily World, having turned down positions in
television for KING in Seattle, a managing editor’s position in Coos Bay, a freelance gig for a diving magazine, my
Seattle Examiner’s post, a chance to work for the AP in Chicago, and, of course, abandoning the novel of our love and
our lives together.
  I see new stories everywhere again, and they don’t just involve you and me or anything out of ordinary reality. Single
and free, drug free, pain free, free for the taking, free floating, free falling. Yes, I know freedom – finally – and it looks
like I never had to go anywhere at all except back to everything that is my soul and under my soles.
  The job will allow me to stay at my beach house, improve the surroundings, expand the deck over the fish pond and
maybe buy the vacant property next door. Eagles soar above the lot just now as I write. Deer graze on my blueberry
bush. Babe rolls in the grass. A flicker pounds at the eucalyptus tree and jays cackle to drown out the barking frogs or
the hoot owls in the distant woods.
  I don’t even have to move – literally and figuratively – to feel the spirit of nature all around me, and I know this new job
is just a natural and wonderful gift from God.
  “Instant karma’s going to get you. It will knock you off your feet. You better recognize it brother, in everyone you
meet. “
  So, how can I bestow some of that karma back to you? I know the novel about our 15 years together is not so fictional
to you and that it does more damage than good, so I’ve simply stopped it where it is, even if I truly believe the ending
and the concluding chapters that are not published do, indeed, clarify all that precedes it and supersedes even us as
characters in this very real world. I can’t take back what it is written, just like you can’t ever take back what choices you
have made, either.
  All we can do is move forward with the waves and the tides of life. Simple, if you know how to float, but damn hard if all
you do is keep flailing about.
  When I was a boy romping in the ocean with my cousins, we would body surf all day, noon to night, in the perfectly
timed and evenly matched waves off the Santa Cruz coast – Rio Del Mar was our favorite spot, where my uncle often
had access to a beach house only yards from the sea. By the time my aunt finally called us back for dinner, our chests
would be scraped and scratched and bloody like we had run through brambles, and our shorts would be torn in tatters
as we always waited on the big wave and caught it time after time after time. To body surf just right, you have to get
right under where the wave eventually will break and then float in place until the back-tide begins to suck you in and
then up. Just as you rise to the crest, you then start swimming with all your might as the wave begins to curl, hurling you
forward like a surfboard sans rider for the most thrilling adrenaline jolt of your life.
  Most body surfers nowadays have wet suits that give them some protection or “boogie boards” that make swimming a
secondary consideration. But we did it raw and we simply thought it was the greatest thing a boy could ever do. Stare
down a wave and master it. Become one with it. Ride it. Fly with it. Succumb to it. Submit to it. Adjust to it. And make it
your own. Be it.
  I believe in the karma of the waves and the ocean and the tide. I believe in the love of my family. We are alive and
thriving, riding new waves in the same ocean where we have always been all our lives. “That’s where fishes go when
fishes get the sense to breathe.”
  You are part of my family, too, and always will be, just like my cousins and my aunt and the friends we have loved
over our lives. We rode some waves together, too, didn’t we? And we might even have a few scars to prove it. We
floated and swam and then crashed mightily in the big wave that was never seen.
   I see it now, and I’m in fine shape to ride it and then get back on my feet to swim out again and again. Maybe you see
it, too, and are just content to let me ride it alone or let it pass. Maybe, like me, you have everything you want and
nothing that you need, which makes wave riding simply something that seems so frivolous or foolish at this stage and
age.
  You are always welcome to come out and try if you like, and I can guarantee that it will bring a smile to your face just
being you and just being me. Now I know for a fact that there are only two kinds of waves in Central Washington, and
they are both waves to endure rather than enjoy. Either it’s a heat wave or a cold wave. One brings dust and smoke
and choking air. The other chills you to the bone, kills most living things and ushers in weather even more unbearable.
That you endure and bear such wave of emotion is commendable to say the least, and I admire your persistence in
riding that wave of marriage again, too, even if the outcome always has been the same, no matter how far or long you
ride.
  My “Free Will Astrology” horoscope this week advises me to bear all to the highest female deity I know, so this will just
have to do under the circumstances of legal and post-marital rules and regulations. You, on the other hand, are free
completely to respond in kind and ride another wave this direction any time a change in climate could do you some
good. It’s done me as good as anything I have ever done since our parting. I can’t imagine it would be anything but
even better for you.

REAL NEWS ABOUT SISYPHUS AND CECILIA AT CAPE ALAVA

Dear Cecilia,

It has been a glorious early spring at the beach, with the flowers already in bloom and the agates
abundantly glistening in the sun and scattered about everywhere like candy. A year has now passed
since the newspaper closed and I am happy to have survived and even thrived in my new
environment.

I hope your move to Central Washington has produced the same sense of peace, joy and freedom,
and I can only pray my writing to you does not endanger or threaten that in any way, other than to
always offer an open invitation should you ever want to visit or stay for any length of time.

The rhythms of the ocean certainly have had a profound calming effect on my life, and I believe my
music has subliminally benefited as a result. It sort of transcends space and time. For example, I just
finished recording the song I wrote years ago when you and I hiked out to Cape Alava, and it is far
better than any version I ever recorded in the past. A few of the lyrics have been changed and the
verses re-ordered, but it is essentially the same song with new life 15 years down the road.

I am working on more new material for an entire CD of songs that I’m tentatively calling, “Highway
101: Revisited,” with obvious allusions to Dylan and the connection to my own song of the same
name. The goal is to capture some of my favorite landscapes of the West, with songs I’ve already
written, such as “Cape Flattery,” or my newest anthem, “The Well,” which was conceived around the
image of the well from the Carmel Mission, as well as thematically based on Dylan’s “All Along the
Watchtower.”

Thank you again and always and forever for the inspiration, the muse and my own freedom to create
such works of original music and poetry, for I now know I could have never accomplished it
otherwise.

“I’m just a soul whose intentions are good. Oh Lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood.”

The Elvis Costello version of that great old Animals tune came on during my run today, and I realized
how much of what I have written to you, and about you, will likely be greatly misunderstood for the
rest of time forward, as it has been in the most recent past. But I don’t think my songs will suffer
from the same fate, only the fate of futility in that I never hope to reap rewards or accomplish
anything at all other than to finish recording the voices and the notes that leap from my soul.

I don’t hear voices in my head, I hear songs, but you always knew that about me from the start. Sort
of my angelic lot in life, I guess.

So “Cape Alava” marks my 56th song on ReverbNation.com, where I continue to get plays
and connections that I could never have imagined in my wildest dreams. From the scribbling and
scrawling in those notebooks you once gave me for my birthday to the Internet wired world and
beyond, the images and the themes and the memories all regenerate a life that grows and blossoms
and takes root, like it always was meant to be. I realize you never wanted your life to be an open
book -- something I can never hope to avoid in the least -- but it always becomes more purposeful,
more focused, more honest, the longer I write it, or play it or sing it. And it always has the same
theme: A note of truth will ring out in perfect key no matter how long it echoes, distinguishing it from
all the ones struck out of tune.

The truth today that lingers is the beauty of that day at Cape Alava and the love that was
consummated that weekend staying in the cabin at Kalaloch. It might seem like ancient history to
you, but it rings out just like the music of the sea for anyone who stumbles there to this day and
onto all time remaining.

I read today Albert Camus’ 1957 induction for the Nobel Prize for Literature, where there is a
discussion of one of his great allusions drawn from the earliest body his work -- the parallels with
the myth of Sisyphus. If you know the story, Sisyphus is punished by Zeus for thinking he is a peer
or as clever as the Gods; his punishment is to roll a rock up to the top of a hill. But each time he rolls
the rock up, it rolls back down. As a result, Sisyphus’ predicament represents a futile act, or
something pointlessly frustrating for the rest of time.

However, Camus’ Nobel inductor, Anders Osterling, notes that the great and greatly misunderstood
writer saw Sisyphus’ fate as a noble one. That he believed he could roll the rock up the hill and kept
believing it, over and over and over again.

“Sisyphus, as Camus interprets him, is happy in the depth of his soul, for the attempt alone satisfies
him.”

I really think Sisyphus was the first to create rock and roll. Time to roll that rock up the hill and watch
it roll right back down.

Like all these letters and songs to you. Like all the words on the wind. Like agates on a beach.

Cape Alava

Down to the coastline, we came with the ocean, to lie by the seaside,
Dreaming in waves, consumed by the tide;
unaware, the incoming tide.
The eagle perched silent, a fawn lay sleeping,
its mother came crashing,
Leaping in grace, to flee from the tide, beware the foreboding tide.

Time drifts out with the sea . . . Dreams set sail on the breeze.
At the edge of the world, and we are free.
Our soul sleeps there on the beach . . .

Skipping a flat rock, the fossilized creek bed,
the tracks of a bear cub,Where Gods made love,
to wed by the tide, the endlessly sustaining tide.

Oh Cape Alava, the wooden path wanders, trailing the seashore,
We embraced as one, blessed by the tide,
immersed in the enveloping tide.

Song of Cecilia

The online rock novel in REAL time

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